


Under me you so quite new

by herbaceous_boarder



Series: Breeding Lilacs Out of the Dead Land (Stirring Dull Roots with Spring Rain) [3]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 20:07:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11858757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/herbaceous_boarder/pseuds/herbaceous_boarder
Summary: Delphine could not believe the rush of utter adoration that had flooded her own body in that moment. It was as if no one had ever spoken her name before. Not till Cosima had someone called her so that in the very pit of her stomach she felt herself recognised and chosen so completely. And as she played the woman’s name over in her head she felt the strange taste of how holy it was on her tongue too. Cosima. Co-si-ma. To say it was to speak her love because she could not say it without her heart upon her tongue.





	Under me you so quite new

**Author's Note:**

> In case the time line is a little confusing, this is Delphine's thoughts as she goes truffle hunting for Cosima in season 1. In this I assume Cosima and Delphine have slept together a few times and Delphine has stayed the night before Cosima discovers the betrayal.

 

 

_i like my body when it is with your_

_body.  It is so quite new a thing._

_Muscles better and nerves more._

_i like your body.  i like what it does,_

_i like its hows.  i like to feel the spine_

_of your body and its bones, and the trembling_

__\- E. E. Cummings_ _

 

 

Truffle hunting.

 

Her earliest memories - and certainly those most untouched by that darkness that began to seep into her world, unsought and implacable, throughout her later years - were those from before she even started school. Before the move, before Paris, before Dyad. One sure but hazy sense of summer in Provence - which in its memory form seemed unbroken from one year to the next. She could not remember the chronology or causation separating and delineating events in the least. Rather she had moments which seemed all part of one eternal moment, distinct only in triggering differently powerful sensory memory. The most precious fragment of all was fraught with smell. The fulsome sweet green of leaves long perfumed by the summer heat as she chased Sophie, laughing, after the enormous, snuffling pig trampling the undergrowth before them.

 

She had so very few memories of Sophie before her mobile, joy-filled form vanished from her feeble store of early childhood experiences, replaced by the sometimes skeletal and frequently bed-bound shell her sister was to become. It was rare, in the long years of city-dwelling and lab-haunting that followed for her to so powerfully relive this moment of glorious elation - limbs flying with a weight that felt at once full and wing-like. And yet in this moment, even in this phony-French chocolaterie where the leaves of the vines draping the walls are but plastic, she finds herself filled with that very bursting elation that makes her bounce a little on her feet as she waits for the chocolatier to wrap her truffles.

 

She feels a recreation. Her sinews and muscles come alive with an energy free from tension that is childlike once more. The smile she accompanies her thanks with as she pays is disproportionately beaming for the occasion. The thrumming of her happiness makes it impossible for her to keep still. As she holds the pole to steady herself on the bus to campus her fingers tap, not restlessly but with jubilance and she finds herself directing unwarranted smiles at enough strangers that she may begin to look suspect. Uncharacteristically, she finds that she has failed to restrain her head from making subconscious bobbing movements to the songs of joy she sings loudly in her head the whole journey. All she sees before her is Cosima - brows crinkling towards one another as she gasped Delphine’s name and came around her fingers for the first time.

 

Delphine could not believe the rush of utter adoration that had flooded her own body in that moment. It was as if no one had ever spoken her name before. Not till Cosima had someone called her so that in the very pit of her stomach she felt herself recognised and chosen so completely. And as she played the woman’s name over in her head she felt the strange taste of how holy it was on her tongue too. Cosima. Co-si-ma. _Cosima_ . To say it was to speak her love because she could not say it without her heart upon her tongue. It would feel profanity to speak it, even silently, any other way.

 

She half-scoffed at the ridiculous ramblings of her own mind over simple sex but still she knew it was not simple sex at all. She understood the chemistry of sex perfectly. Understood the processes of hormone-induced feelings of intimacy and bonding attached to it. But none of that knowledge could account for this. She had known, on an instinctual level she was only just beginning to perceive, when Cosima’s eyes held hers as Cosima coaxed her gently over the precipice into orgasm and held her as she entrusted over control of her body to another more deeply than she ever had before, that she loved Cosima. Co-si-ma. _Cosima_. She had been overwhelmed, the certainty of her feelings for the woman insistently proclaiming itself to her as she held Cosima, watched her, smelled her, tasted her. And as Cosima returned every touch and look Delphine had realised her own beauty. Not that she had been naive or oblivious concerning her obvious appeal to men over the last few years. She had weaponised it expertly. But such was the distinction. That before her beauty had been a possession. Hers but not her. An instrument to be wielded. She had felt little attachment to or pride in such a thing.

 

Under Cosima’s gaze, however, her body had become her at last. In every affirmation of wondering eyes and whispered recognitions of her beauty Delphine had felt herself possess her body as she never had, marveling at her own unity of will and motion with every voluntary movement and at that of body and soul with every involuntary one. She knew of course that sex could not reveal her true identity to her. But sex with Cosima had. She knew now who she was. Complete and yet unmade. She was more a person than she had ever believed and yet there was a possibility for everything that felt more real than the promise of such in adolescence ever had. The promise of living alive, like this but perhaps more even - though she couldn’t yet imagine what more than what she felt now could possibly mean. She saw in the memories of conversations loaded with an affection alternately shy and bold the promise of endless days like this; in those of their twined bodies the echoed promise of a thousand nights more of deeper, closer. All she could think in were majority comparatives as every part of her body and imagination strove to stretch itself, as it was unaccustomed to doing, in order to encompass this newly tasted reality.  

 

Off the bus and walking with unusually buoyant step through campus to Cosima’s apartment, swinging her truffle-bag with a sense of victory, she thought of kissing Cosima once more. The memory of her strong warm tongue unexpectedly skimming her own made her whole body flush and she felt the unaccountable desire to drop from her knees. As she climbed the stairs to the soon-beloved apartment she felt an ecstasy of simultaneous joy and anticipation that flooded her body with the green heat of summer in Provence even in this Minnesota chill that turned her fingers a little purple.

 

She felt at last the freedom of a break from the past that she had not known still held her. Felt the hope for the future she had long given up on, felt the acceptance of previous failings she had never expected to find, felt the security of satiate mutual affection fill in at last the cracks of deep loneliness that had been driven into her for almost as long as she could remember. She felt a childish playfulness that would have seemed foreign mere weeks before. She would leave everything behind without question for this glorious unchaining.

 

She bounced into the room.

 

In moments the cold words and looks had crushed every sensation to deep dread and numb confusion as Delphine’s new world crumbled before her once more.

 

_Delphine Cormier. Not Beraud._

 

Even their names sounded different spoken to each other now. Accusation and desperation using _Cosima_ and _Delphine_ as difference and distance where this morning was invitation and claim. Bodies now wrapped in jumpers and folded arms were alien to one another and the unbounded intimacy of the night seemed necessarily a mirage in this unforgiving winter light. At last she left, Cosima's bewildered questions following her. Knowing now, as her limbs swung in a suddenly ungainly arrayment  of ill-fitting clothes, that she had no idea in the least of who or what she was to have been so found and now so lost.

 


End file.
